Alfred Wegener

Alfred Wegener

Alfred Wegener was 50 years of age when he died. He live through 1880-1930. Alfred Wegener was a German climatologist and geophysicist. He published as expanded version of his 1912 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans. This work was one of the first to prefer continental drift and plate tectonics.

In 1905 Wegener went to work at the Royal Prussian Aeronautical Observatory near Berlin. He used kites and balloons to study the upper atmosphere. He also flew in hot air balloons. When Wegener was 30 he collected his meteorology lectures into a book, The Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere. That book soon became a standard text throughout Germany. In 1912, the year of his continental-drift presentations, Wegener answered the siren call of Greenland again.

He pointed out that the continents are made of a different, less dense rock, like granite, than the volcanic basalt that makes up the deep-sea floor which Wegener proposed that the continents floated kind of like icebergs in water. Wegener also thought that the continents move up and down to maintain equilibrium in a process called isostasy. He cited the sinking of Northern Hemisphere lands under the weight of continental ice sheets in the last ice age, and their rise since the ice melted some 10,000 years ago. Wegener said that the continents floated somewhat like icebergs in water.

When he came back to Marberg, Wegener work on continental drift. Wegener also gave an explanation for mountain ranges. He also saw that when you put Africa and South America together, mountain ranges run uninterrupted across both continents. Wegener was citing geological evidence that some 300 million years ago all the continents had been joined in a supercontinent stretching from pole to pole. He called it Pangaea, and said it began to break up about 200 million years ago, when the continents started moving to their current positions.